Intercultural Communication Barriers. China and the USA, The Difficulties of a Dialogue

Abstract

When people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds meet, they have to cope with the positive and the negative aspects of the intercultural exchange. Barriers such as anxiety, language, stereotypes, prejudice, ethnocentrism, and assumption of similarity instead of difference are the most significant ones to consider. This paper aims to discuss the main difficulties that individuals of various cultures and heritages may face during the intercultural communication process. In particular, this paper takes a closer look at the cultural differences between China and the USA, and at some of the current communication difficulties that the two countries face, caused by lack of mutual understanding, ethnocentrism, stereotypes, prejudice, language, differences of nonverbal indices, political and economic causes.